Some investigating features of the English language in comparison with Uzbek and Karakalpak languages

Tongue height. If we consider the position of the tongue in the mouth we can identify two extreme situations: one in which the body of the tongue is raised, almost touching the roof of the oral cavity and in this case we will be dealing with high or close vowels – the name clearly refers to the position of the tongue high in the mouth or close to the palate – and the opposite position when the body of the tongue is very low in the mouth leaving the cavity wide open as in the case when the doctor wants to examine our tonsils and asks us to say «ah». The vowels thus produced will be called open or low vowels since the tongue is lowered in the mouth and the oral cavity is open. If the tongue is placed in an intermediate position, raised only halfway against the palate, we shall call the vowels mid
vowels. A further, more refined distinction will differentiate between two groups of mid vowels:

• 
  close-mid/mid close or half-close or high-mid/mid high vowels
  
• 
  open-mid/ mid open or half-open or low-mid/mid low vowels
  

If we consider the position of the tongue along the horizontal axis we can identify three classes of vowels:

• 
  front vowels – uttered with the front part of the tongue
  
• 
  highest, central vowels – if it is' rather the central part of the tongue that is highest, modifying the shape of the articulator
  
• 
  back vowels – the rear part of the tongue is involved in articulation
  

The position of the lips. As we have mentioned earlier, the position of the lips is another major criterion that is used to distinguish among vowels. When we pronounce a vowel, our lips can be rounded, and then the resulting sound will be rounded, or they can be spread and then we shall say that the vowel that we have articulated is unrounded. As we are going to see later, roundness may be more or less relevant, depending on the particular language we are talking about. The cavity through which the air is released – oral or nasal establishes are an important distinction between oral and nasal vowels. There are nasal or nasalized vowels in all languages, but again this distinction will be more important in languages like, as we say, French, where it has a functional, contrastive, phonemic value, than in English or in Romanian where the feature is just contextual. More will be said about that later.
As mentioned above, quantity is an important feature that we have to take into account when we discuss not only consonantal sounds, but vocalic ones as well. In fact, this is a feature that is much more important for vowels, because when we talk about duration in consonants we can contrast, for instance, non- durative sounds of the plosive type to continuant sounds of the kind fricatives are or simple to geminate consonants, while in the case of vowels much more refined
distinctions can be established among various sounds.
The fact that vowels vary in length is something we can intuitively become aware of if we contrast the vowel of peel [pi:l] for instance, to that of pill [pyl]. As we are going to see later, however, the contrast between the two vowels is not limited simply to duration and, moreover, vowel length is very much of a contextual feature. Thus, what we consider to be members of one and the same phoneme, the long vowel [i:] will vary considerably in length in words like /sea/,
/seed/ and /seat/. It is obvious even for a phonetically less trained ear that the vowel is longer in case it occurs in syllable-final position and it becomes shorter and shorter depending on the voiced or the voice lessees of the following consonant. The picture becomes even more complex if we compare the preceding contexts to /seal/, /seen/ or /seem/. On the other hand all the occurrences of [i:] mentioned above will be kept apart from the variants of the short vowel [y] in words like /Sid/, /sit/, /sill/ or /sin/ which differ in their turn in length depending on the nature of the following consonant. We shall then say that vowel length is not always a reliable distinctive feature when we try to contrast vowels – since it is so much influenced by the context. Other features will be added to obtain a more refined and closer to reality representation.
The next features we are going to examine will then be the degree of muscular tension involved in articulation and deposition of the root of the tongue. Muscular tension can vary considerably when we produce different vocalic sounds and this is something we can easily become aware of when we contrast the long vowel [i:] in /seat/ and the short one [y] in /sit/, the examples analyzed above. Long vowels – conventionally marked in the ERA alphabet by a colon – are always associated with a higher degree of muscular tension in the speech organs involved in the articulation. We will say that these vowels are tense, since the articulators are so when we utter them. Conversely, when we examine the way the vowel of /sit/ is produced, the articulator organs are less strained, laxer than in the previous case. We will consequently describe these vowels as being lax. As we
shall see later, unlike in Romanian, vowel duration, associated with tenseness, has a phonemic, contrastive value in English.